In this series, The Huffington Post profiles some of the best ballet dancers in the world, working in some of the rarest and most unusual working conditions imaginable, to try to understand how they deal with the same workplace issues that confront the rest of us mere mortals.

Most of us don’t get literal standing ovation from the thousands of parties when we do good work. And most of us don’t have to visit the physical therapist at the beginning and point of every work day. But no matter what sector we’re in, the big questions are the same 😛 TAGEND

To look at her, you’d affirm that Stephanie Rae Williams is in love. She’s dancing with a boy, and from the course that she’s gazing at him as she scoots around, and the way he gazes up at her as he sweeps her in his arms, you just know that they’re profoundly in love. From the path their bodies virtually seem to be talking to each other, you suspect they’re desperately in longing, too.

But they’re not. They’re exactly rehearsing.

It’s Easter Saturday, and while the rest of the city is remaining up or preparing their Sunday feasts, Williams and her peer Da’von Doane, along with half a dozen of their fellow Dance Theatre of Harlem artists, are holed up in a studio at the iconic company’s headquarters on 152 nd Street. As dog-tired dancers lean against the studio’s brick walls, sweating and dangling from the previous recital, Williams and Doane seem to disappear into their own little world. They’re practising a piece announced “When Love, ” a pas de deux choreographed by Helen Pickett, which they’ll act at their City Center engagement in April. The music is by Phillip Glass, with multiple spoken-word segments laid over the violin and choral sing, and between the angelic tones and the pair’s alternately sensitive and embroiling progress, that own little world shows transcendently beautiful.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem was founded in 1969 and has since become one of the nation’s finest fellowships, and one of its most important powers in the slow, crucial, and ongoing fighting to carve out a target for African-Americans in the landscape of American ballet. Along with kits like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company, it has long been a crucible for African-American dancers and choreographers, and a testament to how arts and masters can blossom, even when they’re starved for resources and denied deserved mainstream esteem. In addition to a perform corporation, DTH runs local schools and a community education and outreach program, a multi-pronged approach to the mission of delivering ballet to parties and beings to ballet.

That American ballet is overwhelmingly white-hot will not be bulletin to anyone who has observed the rise of Misty Copeland, who grew American Ballet Theater’s first pitch-black maiden principal ballerina just last year. Dance Theatre of Harlem, nonetheless, has expended decades demonstrating that there’s no real excuse for that overwhelming whiteness: DTH has had black principal ballerinas since the beginning.

Not that it’s ever easy to find them; the pipeline from ballet academies to ballet companies doesn’t contain that many pitch-black ballet dancers, for myriad grounds. Numerous black aspiring ballerinas run up against preconceptions — held by schoolteachers, corporation directors, challenger magistrates, choreographers, and fellow dancers — about what kind of dance they’re best suited to. They’re told that they have an abundance of explosive fortitude but a shortage of goodnes and delicacy, that they don’t have arched enough hoofs, that they lack the long handsome lines that the skill structure arbitrarily asks, and find themselves slowly but surely funneled out of ballet and into other penalties( to say nothing of the lane ballet firms that emphasize ethnic diversity struggle to survive; in 2004, DTH ran into financial difficulties so dire that the company stopped play-act for almost a decade ). Williams, like Copeland and other black ballet dancers, had teaches keep telling her that she might be a better is suitable for contemporary dance rather than classical ballet. She was told that she was too muscular to dance the girlish, gamine roles that are the staple of magnificent floor ballets like “Giselle” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

Williams, who is currently biracial, started ballet when she was 8, and says she was the only pitch-black student in class at her Houston ballet school. “There were two of us in the studio, maybe three but the other girls were older. There were no pitch-black men or black boys either, so it was just the three of us, and in my class I was the only one, ” she said. She was one of the only ones in her elementary school class, very, so ballet class appeared familiar, even if it didn’t detect great. Because she’s biracial, “I was always a little bit not-white or not-black, I’m in the middle, and I didn’t really fit in anywhere, ” Williams said. “So I understood that I was the only pitch-black daughter in the class, but I never felt like,’ Oh, I want to be with more black people, ’ I simply thought it was normal.”

But being the odd one out started appearing abnormal, and like something that could really impedes her chances of being a successful ballerina, as she originated older and started civilizing more seriously. “The older I get, the more I realized that I really like to dance, and school teachers would always tell me,’ You should look at a more modern busines, ’ the typical,’ You have a more muscular torso category, so maybe you should look at[ contemporary] corporations like Hubbard Street[ Dance Chicago ] or Alvin Ailey[ American Dance Theater ],’” she excused. She persisted on the classical footpath, though, and it was when she got her first errand, as an apprentice at the Texas Ballet Theater, that she came to see just how narrow that itinerary was going to be for her.

She was the only pitch-black dancer in the company — in fact, she was the only non-white dancer, age, in a 30 -person company. “I certainly felt it. You don’t feel like you can relate to beings and it was hard because I was young, it was my first profession, so of course I was actually shy.” Teachers and choreographers would critique her dancing in ways that drove dwelling that appreciation of difference. “I went corrections like,’ You stick out and I don’t know what it is, but you need to try to fit in more, ’ which is a horrible correction to give person, ” she said. “I just really think it broke me down a bit.”

Still, she was cast as Clara in “The Nutcracker, ” a starring role in the production that, for most companies, is the most popular happening on the implementation of its docket. It was a big deal, particularly in Dallas, she said, “in a city that’s so white.” But, she said, “I think it was too progressive”; when the brand-new season started, she wasn’t shoot in anything, “and in February the ballet mistress came up to me and said, ‘[ Artistic Director] Ben Stevenson doesn’t looks just like you anymore.'”

Her contract wasn’t regenerated, and, having missed out on audition season, she had to scramble to determine a new job. She concedes that there are multiple explanations for her negative knowledge in Dallas. “Maybe it was a little bit of my dancing, perhaps it was also because I wasn’t a good fit, but a lot of that had to do with my skin color, ” she said, resounding matter-of-fact but understandably throbbed almost a decade afterward. “And that’s when I actually started to realize that, oh, it’s going to be a bit different for me than for other girls I grew up with.”

After Texas Ballet Theater let Williams disappear, her father fostered her to try her luck in New York. Actually, she told her it was her only alternative. “She set me on a plane, like,’ Bye! There’s no where else for you to go, if you want to keep dancing! ’” She spent time training at Alvin Ailey, where she examined more like her classmates, but still felt like an foreigner. “That was the first occasion I ever danced with more black people than white people, and I still kind of persisted out, but I wasn’t exceedingly used to being around black people, ” she said, chuckling. “So I conceive I deemed myself like I was really uncomfortable, because I was.”

But once she loosened, she said, Williams realized lasting friendships with her fellow dancers, and was able to opening a career dancing for small, intentionally diverse firms. She went to London and danced with Ballet Black for several years, and then assembled DTH, where she’s been for six seasons. “I certainly thank my mommy for pushing me on that plane, ” she said, grinning.

And she’s expand at DTH. Despite an injury that sidelined for a year — she blew out her knee and is still operating her way back to full strength — she’s met a region where she fits in. That sense of belonging has given her the tools to become a stand-out dancer, away from the similarity and cookie-cutter pressure of mainstream, that is, overwhelmingly white-hot, classical ballet. “Being here has shown me that there are so many other dancers who aren’t even black who are having a hard time because they’re tall or they’re short, and not going into professional fellowships, ” she said. “Because in ballet you have to have the appear: you have to have their own bodies, the beautiful, the leg, and I think that DTH is not only diverse in color but in form characters — we’re all individual, and we’re all beautiful.”

Back in the studio, artistic chairman and former long-time company member Virginia Johnson is critiquing Williams and Doane’s run-through of “When Love, ” talking through her improvements and committing them a chance to rest after dancing for an intense five-minute stretching. Williams’ hoofs — clad in pointe shoes she coated herself, with CoverGirl foundation, because most pointe shoes are established in a “flesh” tone that doesn’t actually match her flesh — start to cramp, and she shakes them out as Johnson imparts the pair a commentary disguised as a flattery: “The two of you are really good at being beings in this … I want you to go back to being dancers in a few places.”

They’re nearly too good at appearing in love, too terminated in misplacing themselves in the dance. Johnson craves a little more technological accuracy, but once she’s had Williams repeat a specific pirouette about six durations, until it’s merely the practice she wants it, she goes back to the emotional centre of the patch. At a few moments, Williams had applied her hand over her chest, twisted it into a fist, and elongated it out toward Doane. “Is that your middle that you’re yielding him? ” Johnson asks. “Spend more experience with your hand on your chest, that’s your time for you. Then you give it to him. It lets us know that it’s your real center , not just some decoration.”

The sustainability and vitality of ballet depends on diversification of the species that DTH has mastered. That necessitates “more Mistys, ” Williams says, singing Copeland’s accolades. “I’m so happy for her. She’s the sweetest being, she’s so amazing.” And Williams is so pleased to see you both the shift in gathering demographics that Copeland’s rise has inspired. The usual gathering at Lincoln Center and at the Metropolitan Opera House, where American Ballet Theater performs, well, “it’s a lot of older white people, and it’s, like, this one demographic.” But not when Copeland is performing. “Misty brought about by a different gang, ” Williams says. “It’s really great. I adoration it. I got to see her do Juliet last summer, and the audience just got me so pumped up — it’s the most black people I’ve ever seen at the Met, ever. I’ve been going to the Met for a really long time, and there’s never black people at the Met, and all of a sudden, they come for Misty, and it’s so amazing.”

Still, Williams wants to ensure that Copeland’s appointment doesn’t lull parties in or outside of the ballet macrocosm into a false sense of security, or create the impression that the forces that hampered Copeland back have been eliminated by her success. “I don’t want them to be like,’ OK, it’s done, ’” she says. And, she doesn’t require ballet to twilight target to a dearth mentality, the sense that there’s simply one recognise at the pinnacle of American ballet for which all black ballerinas are rivalling. “There’s not only area for one at the top. There’s so much better room.”

And while she enjoys DTH and is grateful for all it’s caused her, in the future, she said, “Hopefully it’s not pitch-black dance and grey dance. It’s simply dance.”

Dance Theatre Of Harlem will act at New York City Center April 6-9 and in Norfolk, Virginia, and Princeton, New Jersey, in May .